Shakespeare

The following are the links identified by my brilliant and witty students in Shakespeare: The Late Plays for Fall 2006. If you have any questions, feel free to email me.

Contains links to Cliff’s Notes study guides for Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. The website offers a brief synopsis of each play as well as scene summaries, commentaries, and glossary terms. Overall, this website is probably most useful as an introduction to the plays, as it lacks critical scholarly essays.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica’s website is a comprehensive Shakespeare study guide. It contains several selected scholarly essays, a filmography, audio clips from various performances, brief commentaries on the plays, and a biography of Shakespeare as well as biographies of Shakespearean scholars and actors. Overall, Encyclopaedia Britannica covers a wide breadth of information which could be useful for research, but may be overwhelming for simple study.

Contains an extensive library of web links on such diverse subjects as Shakespeare’s life and times, authorship questions, glossary and terms, quotations, etc. This site may lead to valuable information for research. However, the content seems to be comprised solely of links and this may be undesirable if you seek quick, concise information on the Bard.

This website provides brief but useful information, including Shakespeare’s biography, Shakespeare at school, and Shakespeare’s Stratford. In addition, there are brief synopses of the plays and a few selected critical essays (most notably on Othello, The Tempest, and Macbeth). Navigation is simple and straightforward, and there are no pop-up issues.

-This website offers a list of well known quotations from various works by Shakespeare. An interesting feature is that you can click on each quote and it will show an information page, but this page is quite limited in the information it provides. The site also contains a list of plays that can be read online, which are linked to literaturepage.com.

~Melissa Iommelli

Mr. William Shakespeare and the Internet: The Theater

-“Shakespeare’s Theatre” provides a number of links for anyone interested in learning about the different aspects of theatre, such as music and costumes, during Shakespeare’s time and the present. The site also contains links to the Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, which consists of people who perform the Bard’s plays worldwide.

~Melissa Iommelli

A really good site - its purpose statement: to act as a guide to the “scholarly Shakespeare resources available on the Internet,” and a cache of “non-scholarly” facts and amusing details about Shakespeare’s life and works. This site also includes a time line, the genealogy of Shakespeare, and lists other educational sites/links for the researching student.

--Caylee Moody

This first site seems to be a great site. It has many links available on this page. There are links to provide information about all sorts of things. Information on sonnets, biographical information, and play information. There are links to study guides and other websites that have other information. It lists all the sources for the site. It is fairly easy to use also.

--Ben Stewart

Shakespeare's Sonnets

-This site includes all of Shakespeare’s sonnets. The page may take a little while to finish loading, depending on the computer, but once finished, each sonnet has a link where one can read more information about it, as well as an in-depth analysis for a better understanding.

~Melissa Iommelli

Shakespeare Links (from KSU)

This site will actually prove to be very useful. Actually, this webpage is a collection of Shakespeare sites ranging from the playwright’s personal history, individual works, as well as links to other scholarly resources (university sites that include links dedicated to Shakespeare).

--Lauren Lear

Shakespeare Sites (through State of Pennsylvania school site)

All of the links collected on this website in specific reference to Hamlet is exciting. This site also contains teaching guides as well as compilations of modern movies with Shakespearean themes.

--Lauren Lear

Shakespeare Resource Center

This website is designed very efficiently. It is helpful in all aspects of Shakespeare study. There are references to Elizabethan history as well as individual studies of plays, sonnets, and works. This site is very well organized and will be extremely useful.

--Lauren Lear

British Film Institute
This website offers a different type of Shakespeare information: his plays in film.
Screenonline lists and summarizes a few of his late plays such as The Tempest, A Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Pericles, in which the summaries discuss the plots and characters of Shakespeare’s plays themselves. This website does not take a critical view of the films listed. I found it informative to read the brief yet informative summaries while viewing the lists of Shakespeare’s plays in film. (Just in case you didn’t read the play when you were supposed to and needed to rent the film at Blockbuster or something... hehe).

--Caylee Moody

Shakespeare Online
This website seems like a site for transitional students from high school to college-level Shakespeare. The format is easy to understand, yet it is packed with college-level information for research purposes. There is a site map that lists several links - plots, themes, videos, glossary, and much more. I will definitely visit this site again.

--Caylee Moody

This second site has lots of information too. It has analysis of some of his works and biographical information as well. There are lots of articles about where Shakespeare has worked. There are essays about all of works too. The essays provide lots of information about works and Shakespeare in general. I found this site a lot easier to use than the previous site.

--Ben Stewart

E-notes: Shakespeare

Although not particularly pleasing in appearance, this site has some unique features that make up for other deficiencies. In addition to a standard biography, works list, etc., this page also contains an entire section dedicated to interesting facts and details from all of Shakespeare's plays. Other sections provide reading notes, historical contexts, and critical essays. The quotes page is fun, too!

--Elissa Graeser

The Complete Works of Shakespeare (from MIT)

One of the first places I ever read Shakespeare online, this website is an old favorite. Easy to navigate and fairly complete, this page is a solid resource if your main interest is in reading Shakespeare. The plays are formatted in a clean, unobtrusive way and are divided into categories. However, the sonnets/poetry area is down and the plays do not have line numbers.

--Elissa Graeser

The Literature Network: Shakespeare

With a very thorough and reader-friendly layout, this web page provides complete versions of all of Shakespeare's plays and poetry. Addition content includes study guides, play summaries, practice quizzes, a search engine, an interactive forum, a newsletter, and a full biography. My browser stopped a single pop-up when I loaded the page, but other than that the site appears clean.

This page is decent. It has a brief biography that covers the major parts of Shakespeare’s life, and it lists his poetry and dramas along with the dates that they were written.

This is a very interesting site. It has all of the usual relevant information about Shakespeare’s life. It also has some less common information about the town that he was raised in (government, population, layout, and even epidemic information). There is information about his authorship and about the plots of his plays. There is also a list of study tools. All in all, it is a very informative site, and it is nice to find some less common information.

This site was actually designed for high school students (it says so right on the page). It has a decent amount of information about Shakespeare’s life, along with some nice pictures and other entertaining devices (including a Shakespearean insult generator), however it doesn’t provide that much sound information. One portion of the page even mentions that the authors are not experts on Shakespeare. They also do not go into great detail about his plays, but they do include some quotes.